Guided Tours

The new Quilt U class I'm taking, Elements in Fabric, is kicking my butt. We're creating "element" pieces--so far, water & fire--using fabric and things like angelina fibers, tintzl, cellophane, and sheers. After sweating blood and throwing my scissors across the room (several times) I managed to finish both pieces, but they're both too ugly to post. This is a real exercise in patience for me, since I rarely try to work from a pre-conceived idea, sketches, AND photographs all at the same time and get something that looks both good and realistic without looking cheesy (it's a fine line with all that tintzl and angelina). I'm going to stick with it, though; it's a good learning exercise.

I took a little breather from the class work and painted more fabric. Several issues ago, Quilt Art had an article on using bleeding tissue paper over painted fabric. I tried regular tissue paper but it didn't work. I happened to see some bleeding tissue at Michael's a couple of weeks ago, and picked some up. The results aren't quite what I expected; some of the tissue colors (red & blue) bleed much better into the fabric than others. Some pieces simply acted as a sunblock on the sun prints. Here are the results. The first piece started with a blue background (I used Setacolor transparents mixed 50-50 with water on damp pfd fabric); as you can see, I got a little color from the blues, greens, and yellows, but the red is the most prominent.

















The second piece started with a yellow, buttercup, and red background. I like the playfulness of that one.














The piece on the left started out with a blue and red background. The colors didn't bleed as well onto the red as they did onto the blue.












This one is my favorite; I intended for it to look like translucent wildflowers, but I see trees instead. I think I'll use this for a small wholecloth quilt.